Syllabus:

Prerequisites:
Statistics I and Data Analysis
Informatik A: Algorithmen
Introduction to Computational Linguistics
Introduction to Semantics
Pragmatic reasoning is reasoning about what a speaker may have meant by an utterance at a given occasion. Pragmatic reasoning requires listeners to draw on different sources of possibly uncertain information from context and world-knowledge. Likewise, listeners need to reason about the speakerâ€ös state of mind, her beliefs and goals, and possibly even about the speakerâ€ös idiosyncratic use of language. To combine these sources of information about what the speaker has likely meant we turn towards probabilistic modelling. This course will cover a sequence of increasingly complex models of listenersâ€ö probabilistic inferences about speaker meaning, including applications to referential communication, scalar implicatures, vagueness, generics, politeness and tropes. We will formulate models in a probabilistic programming language called WebPPL. We will exercise with model code by going through selected chapters of the web-book Probabilistic Language Understanding.